Opinion: Bernie should go the distance

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., addresses the news media Sunday afternoon after a meeting at his Burlington home with his advisers and supporters about his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.(Photo11: Aki Soga/Free Press)Buy Photo

The polls have shown that voters from all corners of the political spectrum continue to favor Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in a general election against Donald Trump, and his lead is growing, while Clinton’s is narrowing to a tie.

If Trumps wins, it will be because Hillary’s actions do not match her words. One cannot be for the underdog, the disenfranchised and accept millions from the biggest corporations, the biggest donations from the pharmaceutical industry, from the private prison system, Wall Street, etc. She gestures to minorities, but her values lie in a deeply rooted materialistic, elitist power structure that has been growing for decades, and which has been failing the 99 percent.

The strategy is one of “containment.” Give the masses just enough to keep them marginally content, keep them from erupting, so that corrupt corporations and institutions, big business, can keep growing, keep amassing more power and control over our lives, while true quality of life remains a distant dream, an idea somewhere on the horizon, always out of reach as most toil away on their treadmills, in a system where a secondary labor market job, largely comprised of minority workers, is the best thing most can hope for.

As Trump pivots toward the White House a growing number look to Sanders for his passionate commitment to the underdog, not a welfare state, not the freeloader or the entitled 1 percent. And, with that, the Clintonians are resorting to pressure tactics and guilt tripping, laying blame on the Sanders campaign for a possible Trump White House. If Hillary loses, the Clinton camp will have no one to blame but themselves. Shifting the blame just lowers the bar and all Trump has to do is step over it.

The groundswell of support for Sanders has to do with what he represents –true democracy in action. His vision is the antithesis of Clinton’s and no more radical than FDR who at the dawn of the Great Depression warned of the “unlikely alliance between big business and big government” and urged the American people to “resist the concentration of economic power...to don liberty caps like their revolutionary forebears…or risk all property [becoming] concentrated in the hands of a few with the overwhelming majority becoming serfs.”